Fallow the Leader
The Miranda Grell incident earlier this year really made one wonder whether the mentality and character of those who desire leadership oughtn’t to disqualify them from leading us. Here’s another nudge to consider this.
A Tory parliamentary candidate who bombarded his Liberal Democrat rival with hate mail and vandalised the party’s Watford headquarters was facing jail today after admitting more than 70 offences of criminal damage and harassment.
Ian Oakley, 31, of West Drayton, northwest London, admitted mounting a two-year hate campaign against Sal Brinton, who he considered his main rival to defeat the sitting Labour MP.
Oakley admitted making silent phone calls to her home and sending lesbian magazines and letters addressed to “Sal Bitchton” to her workplace.
The candidate, who resigned from the Conservative Party after his activities were discovered, also slashed tyres and wrecked shutters at the party’s local offices.
His campaign of harassment was motivated by a “desire to change the political landscape in Watford” after he was chosen to be Tory candidate in 2006, St Albans Magistrates Court heard.
It’s amazing how gay-baiting always seems to be a core component of these campaigns of smearing and harassment. In both recent examples, the victim was a LibDem, though they can hardly complain since they famously rejuvenated the practice in Bermondsey in 1983.
Comments
| 6 August 2008, 10:52 am |
Danny Finkelstein’s piece on his role in selecting this idiot is an unintentionally hilarious mea culpa.
| 6 August 2008, 11:17 am |
You just never know what someone’s going turn out like. There was nothing in Ian Oakley’s background to suggest anything like this.
| 6 August 2008, 11:18 am |
There was nothing in Ian Oakley’s background to suggest anything like this.
He’s a Tory.
| 6 August 2008, 11:38 am |
On a tangent, does the latest Harry’s Place banner remind you of that scene from Batman Begins where Wayne is returning from Bhutan with Alfred?
“I’m going to show the people of Britain that the country doesn’t belong to the Brownites. People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. I can’t do this as foreign secretary. A cabinet member is just flesh and blood and can be ignored or destroyed. But as a prime minster, I can be incorruptible, everlasting.
P.
| 6 August 2008, 11:40 am |
This man must be mentally ill!
Very poor of the Conservatives not to vet him properly as a PPC
| 6 August 2008, 11:40 am |
This man must be mentally ill!
Very poor of the Conservatives not to vet him properly as a PPC
| 6 August 2008, 11:49 am |
Well I’m just astounded that when they asked him how he’d go about changing the political landscape in Watford, and he answered that he’d start a hate campaign against Sal Brinton, and make silent phone calls to her home and send lesbian magazines and letters addressed to “Sal Bitchton” to her workplace, and send her campaign literature on which he’d written “Go back to Cambridge, you evil bitch” and “Suck my cock Sal Brinton”, and then send Russell Wilson letters accusing him of paedophilia and daub graffiti on his home branding him a “scum scum perv” and send his neighbours letters saying he was a member of a child-abuse ring, they still decided he was the best candidate.
Mind you I don’t know what the others were like.
| 6 August 2008, 11:54 am |
If he thought she was a lesbian, why would he then entreaty her to suck his member in a, presumably, heterosexual manner?
| 6 August 2008, 11:56 am |
Mind you I don’t know what the others were like.
Like Miranda Grell perhaps?
| 6 August 2008, 12:01 pm |
Wardytron, LOL! I was in the audience at the selection meeting and, oddly enough, those tactics didn’t feature in his campaign plans.
| 6 August 2008, 12:07 pm |
I can imagine he’d have kept quiet about what his precise plans were - he probably just said something vague about having some rather impressive tricks up his sleeve, and if anyone asked for more detail called them a scum scum perv told them to suck his cock.
| 6 August 2008, 12:42 pm |
and if anyone asked for more detail called them a scum scum perv told them to suck his cock.
But not lesbians, apparently.
| 6 August 2008, 1:31 pm |
Indeed Brett, as a Liberal Democrat I feel no right to complain if a Tory slashed my tires and sent me hate mail - in the light of highly disputable claims made about an election campaign that took place in South London a quarter of a century ago (before I was born) and fought by a maniac left-wing Labour party, a maniac ‘real’ Labour party and the Liberals, a party that merged into the Lib Dems in 1988.
Obviously.
| 6 August 2008, 3:30 pm |
The Miranda Grell incident earlier this year really made one wonder whether the mentality and character of those who desire leadership oughtn’t to disqualify them from leading us.
And the premierships of Thatcher and Blair hadn’t already given you any reason to consider that? Where have you been for the past thirty years?
| 6 August 2008, 3:36 pm |
Sean Fear is right, as I’ve posted elsewhere. http://dogstarscribe.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/ian-oakley/
| 6 August 2008, 5:57 pm |
Oh dear, Gregg does go into a strop if anyone mentions dear old Miranda.
| 7 August 2008, 4:28 am |
Oh dear, Gregg does go into a strop if anyone mentions dear old Miranda.
I’m sorry, when have I ever gone into a strop at the mention of Grell’s name? I’ve no time for the woman. Are you thinking of Mike?
I’m just bemused by your line - that Grell’s viperous tactics suddenly had you questioning the mentality of wannabe politicians.
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